Blood River: The Terrifying Journey through the World's Most Dangerous Country

By Tim Butcher

A British journalist retraces the legendary 1874 expedition of H. M. Stanley in this “remarkable marriage of travelogue and history” (Max Hastings, author of Armageddon).
 
When Daily Telegraph correspondent Tim Butcher was sent to Africa in 2000,. he quickly became obsessed with the Congo River and the idea of recreating H. M. Stanley’s nineteenth-century journey along the nearly three-thousand-mile waterway. Despite repeated warnings that his plan was suicidal, Butcher set out for the Congo’s eastern border with just a backpack and a few thousand dollars hidden in his boots.
 
Making his way in an assortment of vehicles, including a motorbike and a dugout canoe, helped along by a cast of characters from UN aid workers to a pygmy rights advocate, he follows in the footsteps of the great Victorian adventurer. Butcher’s forty-four-day journey along the Congo River is an unforgettable story of exploration, survival, and history come to life.
 
“Quite superb . . . a masterpiece.” —John le Carré, #1 New York Times–bestselling author
 
“Do NOT try to repeat Tim Butcher’s audacious and terrifying Congo journey. If you do, you will probably die.” —The Guardian
 
“[Blood River] keeps the heart beating and the attention fixed from beginning to end.”—Fergal Keane, international bestselling author of Wounds
 
“It is the wit and passion of the writing that keeps you engrossed.”—Giles Foden, author of The Last King of Scotland

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Sep 15, 2009
• ISBN: 9781555849092

Book preview

Preface

I stirred in the pre-dawn chill, my legs pedalling for bedclothes kicked away earlier when the tropical night was at its clammiest. I could hear African voices singing to a drum beat coming from somewhere outside the room, but my view was fogged by the mosquito net, and all I could make out around me were formless shadows. Slowly and carefully, so as to not to anger them, I reached for the sheet balled next to my knees. It stank of old me and insect-repellent as I drew it over my shoulders. I was not just looking for warmth. I wanted protection. Outside was the Congo and I was terrified.

On the grubby floor next to the bed, my kit lay ready in the dark. There were my boots with their clunky tread and sandy suede uppers. Two thousand dollars were hidden in each, counted carefully the day before, folded into plastic bags and tucked under the insoles. There was my rucksack, packed and repacked several more times for reassurance with my single change of clothes, a heavy fleece, survival bag and eight bottles of filtered water. Explorers who first took on the Congo in the nineteenth century brought with them small armies bearing the latest European firearms and the best available medicines to protect against ebola, leprosy, smallpox and other fatal endemic diseases. The only protection I carried was a penknife and a packet of baby-wipes.

I was in a large town called Kalemie, but all was dark outside. It lies on the Congo’s eastern approaches, a port city on the edge of Lake Tanganyika, once connected by boat with Tanzania, Zambia and the world beyond. Forty years of decay have turned it into a disease-ridden ruin and its decrepit hydroelectric station could barely muster a flicker. As with the rest of this huge country, the locals in Kalemie have long since learned to regard electrical power as a rare blessing, not a permanent right.

Now too anxious to sleep, I got up and dressed, taking special care not to ruck the dollars as I slipped on my boots. The charcoal burner, used to warm the gluey brick of rice I had eaten the previous night, glowed as I unlocked the double padlock on the back door and pushed open the crudely-welded security gate. I was staying in a bleak building, cloudy with mosquitoes and lacking running water, but the fact that it housed an American aid group made it a target in a country where acute poverty makes lawlessness routine. Against the lightening sky in the east I could make out a crude line of jagged bottle fragments cemented to the top of the high perimeter wall.

‘Is anyone there?’ My voice set off a dog barking outside the compound. The night watchman stepped out smartly from shadows.

‘Present, patron.’ The tone of his reply made him sound like a soldier answering roll call: subservient, militaristic and deferential. It was the tone of the Congo, drilled into its people first by gun-wielding white outsiders and then by cruel local militia.

As I checked over the motorbikes I had lined up for my journey, I could feel that the guard was anxious to reassure me. ‘Don’t worry, patron, everything is okay’ he told my arched back as I bent over a rear wheel. T was awake all night long and nobody came over the wall.’ He was a trained teacher, but the collapse of the Congolese state meant there was no money in teaching. The $30 he earned for a month of nights spent swatting mosquitoes in this compound was enough to keep him from his pupils.

The eastern sky was slowly growing more pale, but I turned to face west. Out there the darkness remained absolute. I felt a presence. Between me and the Atlantic Ocean lay a primeval riot of jungle, river, plain and mountain stretching for thousands of kilometres. For years I had stared at maps dominated by the Congo River, a silver-bladed sickle, its handle anchored on the coast, its tip buried deep in the equatorial forest, but now I could feel its looming sense of vastness. It scared me.

I have come to know well my own symptoms of fear. In ten years as a war correspondent I have crossed enough active frontlines and stared at enough airily-waved gun barrels to recognise how my subconscious reacts. For me terror manifests itself through clear physical symptoms, an ache that grows behind my knees and a choking dryness in my throat.

I had spent three years preparing for this moment, planning and researching, and it had already taken a week of delays and hassle just to reach this spot, but the most dangerous part of my journey was only now beginning. Feeling as if my legs were about to collapse, I croaked a faint curse against the obsession that had drawn me to the most daunting, backward country on Earth.

I fingered a piece of paper folded in my pocket. It was a travel pass bearing the smudgy ink stamps of the local district commissioner, granting permission for ‘Butcher, Timothi’ to make a journey overland to the Congo River 500 kilometres away. It spelled out the modes of transport authorised for the trip: bicycle, motorbike and dugout canoe. To reach the river I would have to travel west, crossing Katanga, a province that has been in a state of near-permanent rebellion for more than forty years, and Maniema, a province where cannibalism remains as real today as it was in the nineteenth century, when bearer parties refused to take explorers there for fear of being eaten. Even if I made it to the river, I would still have 2,500 kilometres of descent before reaching my final goal, close to where the Congo River spews into the Atlantic.

I remembered the reaction of the commissioner’s secretary in Kalemie when I had collected the pass a few days earlier. After reading my itinerary he stopped writing, put his pen down very deliberately and raised his head to look at me. The lenses of his thick-framed glasses were misty with scratches, but I could still see his pupils pulse with disbelief.

‘You want to go where?’

‘I want to go to the Congo River.’

‘You want to go overland?’

‘Yes.’

‘My family comes from a village on the way to the river, but we have not been able to go there for more than ten years. How do you think you will get there?’

‘With a motorbike and some luck.’

‘You are a white man, you will need something more than luck.’

Shaking his head slowly, his gaze dropped back to the travel pass, which he stamped with the seal of office of the District Commissioner for North Katanga. As I turned to leave I looked round the office. It had a crack in one wall so wide I could see blue sky through it, an old Bakelite telephone connected to nothing, and a tatty air that spoke of regular bouts of looting.

Commissioner Pierre Kamulete had hidden his surprise rather better when I approached him for permission to travel. He listened politely to my request, then gestured for me to join him over at the cracked wall where a large map hung. It was foxed with damp patches and bore place names that had not been used for decades. He pointed at the gap between Kalemie and the headwaters of the Congo River.

‘You see this road that is marked here?’ His finger traced what was shown as a national highway running due west from the lake. ‘It does not exist any more. And the railway here. That does not work, either. A storm washed away the bridge. I don’t know what route you will use, but it will take you a long time.’

But it wasn’t the lack of roads that really worried me. It was the rebels, especially the mai-mai.

Mai-mai is a corruption of ‘water-water’ in the local language of Swahili and refers to the magical water with which rebels douse themselves after it has been imbued with special properties by sorcerers. Believers will tell you that bullets fired at anyone sprinkled with the special water will fall harmlessly to the ground. Non-believers will tell you that mai-mai are well-armed, dangerous killers who answer to nobody but themselves.

I had seen my first mai-mai soldier earlier that day. He was sidling along the potholed main road in Kalemie. He had the swagger you see all over Africa when possession of a weapon transforms a boy into a man. His uniform was typically hotchpotch, his beret was cocked at a fashionable angle and his eyes were hidden by dark glasses. But the thing that marked him out as mai-mai was that he was carrying a bow and arrow.

‘The traditional belief system is very strong, and for the mai-mai a bow and arrow is every bit as good a weapon as a modern assault rifle. The arrow tip is dipped in poison made from plants found in the bush and the poison is highly toxic. Believe me, it works.’ My security briefing had come from Wim Verbeken, a human-rights specialist at the local United Nations headquarters built in the ruins of Kalemie’s abandoned cotton mill.

He explained how all the mai-mai in the Congo were meant to have put away their bows and arrows a year earlier under the terms of the ceasefire that supposedly ended the country’s latest civil war. But he also explained how outside the major towns like Kalemie it was impossible to enforce the agreement and how the killing, rape and violence continued in the area I wanted to travel through.

‘If we get reports of mai-mai activity, we are supposed to send a patrol to check it out. But then we also have a strict policy that we only patrol roads that are jeepable, that we can drive down in a jeep. Here in Kalemie the jeepable roads stop just a few kilometres outside town. I come from Belgium and this province alone is fifteen times bigger than my own country. Nobody really knows what is going on out there.’

I was grateful for his candour as he spelled out the hazards. He said there was a particular mai-mai leader who liked to be known by his radio call sign Tango Four. Wim described him in somewhat undiplomatic language as a ‘psychotic killer’ and warned me that he was still out there in the bush. But Wim hadn’t finished. He said there were also reports of activity involving the interahamwe, Hutu fugitives from Congo’s troubled neighbour, Rwanda. These were the murderers responsible for the 1994 genocide of Tutsis in Rwanda and they had spent the last decade surviving in the lawless forests of eastern Congo. At this point Wim leaned right across the table for emphasis.

‘Believe me, you don’t want to meet the interahamwe.’

Thoughts of rebels and poisoned arrows swirled through my mind as I tucked the travel pass safely into a pocket. Someone could be heard running outside the compound and then came a pounding on the gate. It swung open and the sweating face of Georges Mbuyu appeared, gasping an apology.

‘I thought I was going to be late. Let’s go.’

Georges was a pygmy. A man just five foot tall and half my body weight was to be my protector through the badlands of the Congo. It was then that the backs of my knees really began to throb.

1.

Africa’s Broken Heart

It was a strange setting for a revelation. I was sunbathing on the beach of a luxury hotel next to the Indian Ocean, wearing nothing but blue swimming trunks and sunglasses, reading a book on African history. I know exactly what I had on, because around that moment someone took a photograph of me. It shows me concentrating hard, my fingers, slimy with sun-cream, splaying the pages. What it cannot show, though, is the racing surge in my heartbeat. I had just read something about the Congo that was going to change my life.

Recently appointed as Africa Correspondent for The Daily Telegraph, I was doing what every new foreign correspondent must: cramming. My reading list was long. After Africa’s early tribal history came the period of exploitation by outsiders, starting with centuries of slavery and moving on to the Scramble for Africa, when the white man staked the black man’s continent in a few hectic years at the end of the nineteenth century to launch the colonial era. Then came independence in the late 1950s and 1960s when the Winds of Change swept away regimes that some white leaders had boasted would stand for ever. And it finished with the post-independence age of economic decay, war, coup and crisis, with African leaders manipulated, and occasionally murdered, by foreign powers, and dictatorships clinging to power in a continent teeming with rebels, loyalists and insurgents.

The one constant through each of these episodes was the heavy undertow of human suffering. It gnawed away at every African epoch I read about, no matter whether it was caused by nineteenth-century colonial brutes or twenty-first-century despots. Generations of Africans have suffered the triumph of disappointment over potential, creating the only continent on the planet where the normal rules of human development and advancement simply don’t apply.

It was this sense of stagnation that troubled me most as I worked through my reading list. Sub-Saharan Africa has forty-one separate countries of stunning variety - from parched desert to sweaty rainforest, from wide savannah to snow-tipped volcano - and yet as I did my background research, the history of these varied countries merged into a single, pro-forma analysis. I came to focus on which Western country exploited them during the colonial period and which dictator abused them since independence. The analysis was as crude as the underlying assumption: that African nations are doomed to victim status.

Things had been different when I was younger. I grew up in Britain in the 1970s and collected milk-bottle tops so that my Blue Peter children’s television heroes could dig wells for Kenyan villagers. My last day at school in 1985 was the day when the Live Aid concert rocked the world for victims of the Ethiopian famine. And as a student in the late 1980s I did my bit to bring down the apartheid regime in South Africa, boldly refusing to use my cashpoint card in British banks linked to the white-only government.

But by the time I started working in Africa as a journalist in 2000, its patina of despair had thickened to impenetrability. An old newspaper hand took me to one side shortly before I flew out to Johannesburg and gave me some advice. This man was no fool and no brute. He had stood on a beach in west Africa twenty years earlier and watched thirteen members of the Liberian cabinet shot by rebel soldiers wearing grubby tennis shoes, a horror that scarred his soul until the day he died. But his only advice to me, the novice, was: ‘Just two things to remember in Africa - which tribe and how many dead.’

The Congo was prominent in every African era. As a child I had prided myself on knowing some of its history, about how Joseph Conrad used his time as a steamboat skipper on the mighty Congo River as the basis for his novel Heart of Darkness. I am of the Apocalypse Now generation and can remember earnest conversations in school common rooms about how film-maker Francis Ford Coppola had borrowed directly from Conrad to create his cinematographic masterpiece on the depths the human soul can plumb. My friends and I would argue about whether Conrad was being racist, suggesting that black Africa was in some way inherently evil, or whether he used equatorial Africa simply as a backdrop for a novel about how wicked any human can become.

In my early months working in Africa, the Congo’s contemporary woes soon became clear. It was in the Congo that the world’s bloodiest war was raging. It began in 1998 and, by the time I started work, it was claiming more than 1,000 lives a day. But the truly staggering thing was how this loss of life barely registered in the outside world. Like so many other places in Africa, the Congo had come to be seen as a lost cause, and the costliest conflict since the Second World War passed largely unnoticed.

Before my moment of revelation, I found all of this a curiosity. What drove my interest up a quantum level was when, lolling on my sun lounger, I discovered a direct, personal link to the Congo and its turbulent history. I read that it had all been started by another reporter sent to Africa by the Telegraph more than a century before me. His name was Henry Morton Stanley.

In the Victorian era, Stanley was the world’s best-known journalist, famous for the scoop of the century - tracking down the Scottish explorer, David Livingstone, in November 1871. The soundbite he came up with was as glib and memorable as any a modern spin doctor could conjure. Stanley’s ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume,’ greeting remains so dominant that it has overshadowed his much greater and more significant achievement.

It came on his next epic trip to Africa between 1874 and 1877, when he solved the continent’s last great geographical mystery by mapping the Congo River. Commissioned jointly by the Telegraph and an American newspaper, The New York Herald, he hacked his way through a swathe of territory never before visited by a white man, crossing the Congo River basin and proving that the continent’s previously impenetrable hinterland could be opened up by steamboats on a single, huge river. He presumed to name the river Livingstone, in honour of his mentor, but it is now known as the Congo. His methods were brutal, opening fire on tribesmen who did not instantly obey, pillaging food and supplies. And his brazenness in describing his methods when he eventually reached home stirred angry controversy among humanitarian activists of the day. But their complaints were deafened by the hero’s welcome Stanley received when he returned to London in 1878.

His Congo fame was fleeting. At the Telegraph’s London headquarters today there is a modest collection of paintings and busts of the paper’s luminaries. But there is no mention of Stanley or his Congo trip, even though it changed history more dramatically than anything the newspaper has ever been involved with.

Stanley’s adventure caught the eye of a minor European monarch, Leopold II, King of the Belgians. Leopold read about Stanley’s expedition in the newspaper, seeing past the reporter’s colourful account of cannibals, man-eating snakes and river rapids so ferocious they devoured men by the canoe-load. Desperate for a colony that would mark Belgium’s arrival as a world power, Leopold saw rich potential in Stanley’s story. The explorer had found a river that was navigable across much of central Africa and Leopold envisaged it as the main artery of a huge Belgian colony, shipping European manufactured goods upstream and valuable African raw materials downstream.

Stanley’s Congo expedition fired the starting gun for the Scramble for Africa. Before his trip, white outsiders had spent hundreds of years nibbling at Africa’s edges, claiming land around the coastline, but rarely venturing inland. Disease, hostile tribes and the lack of any clear commercial potential in Africa meant that hundreds of years after white explorers first circumnavigated its coastline, it was still referred to in mysterious terms as the Dark Continent, a source of slaves, ivory and other goods, but not a place white men thought worthy of colonisation. It was Leopold’s jostling for the Congo that forced other European powers to stake claims to Africa’s interior, and within two decades the entire continent had effectively been carved up by the white man. The modern history of Africa - decades of colonial exploitation and post-independence chaos - was begun by a Telegraph reporter battling down the Congo River.

Reading about this epoch-changing journey seeded an idea in my mind that soon grew into an obsession. To shed my complacency about modern Africa and try to understand it properly, it was clear what I had to do: I would go back to where it all began, following Stanley’s original journey of discovery through the Congo. The historical symmetry of working for the same paper as Stanley was appealing, but this alone was not enough. What really stirred me was the sense of challenge that the Congo represented. I had covered wars in Croatia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Iraq and elsewhere, but the work had started to feel routine. I wanted to leave the journalistic herd, to find a project that would both daunt and inspire me. Facing down the Congo was just such a project.

I don’t need that beach photograph to remind me how excited I felt at that moment. And I don’t need it to remind me how fear overwhelmed the excitement. It was not just the war that made the idea of crossing the Congo dangerous. There was something far more sinister.

For me the Congo stands as a totem for the failed continent of Africa. It has more potential than any other African nation, more diamonds, more gold, more navigable rivers, more fellable timber, more rich agricultural land. But it is exactly this sense of what might be that makes the Congo’s failure all the more acute. Economists have no meaningful data with which to chart its decline. Much of its territory has long been abandoned to a feral state of lawlessness and brutality. With a colonial past bloodier than anywhere in Africa, the Congo represents the sum of my African fears and the root of my outsider’s shame.

Decay has hollowed the Congo name. It has a rich history, but of its present, precious little is known. People remember flickers from its past - the brutality of the early colonials, the post-independence chaos of elected leaders beaten to death, corrupt dictators whittling away the nation’s wealth, mercenaries running amok in wars too complex for the outside world to bother with, rebels who rely on cannibalism and fetishism. Foreign journalists smirk at an old Congo story dating from the 1960s when rape was so common that a British reporter approached a column of refugees demanding, Is there a nun here who’s been raped and speaks English?’

Travellers have long since stopped venturing there and the remnants of a once-booming African economy are regarded as too murky and risky for most conventional business travellers. Today, only a handful of aid workers, peacekeepers and journalists dare visit, but the vast scale of the place - from one side to the other is greater than the distance from London to Moscow - and the depth of its problems make it difficult to focus on much beyond a particular project in a particular place. I wanted to do something more complete, something that had not been done for decades, to draw together the Congo’s fractious whole by travelling Stanley’s 3,000-kilometre route from one side to the other.

In part my obsession came from another Congo journey that had nothing to do with Stanley. In late 1958 two young, middle-class English girls, lugging trunks full of souvenirs and party frocks, crossed the Congo. My mother and a close school friend were in their early twenties and, for them, the Congo was simply another leg in a rich travel adventure. Sent to colonial Africa as a sort of unofficial finishing school, they had worked, danced, giggled and charmed their way through a series of jobs and house parties, from Cape Town in South Africa to Salisbury, then the capital of Rhodesia.

They were nearing the end of their journey when they entered the Congo. Within a year the country would be at war, but today my mother recalls no sense of that impending doom. In all honesty, she remembers little about the trip by rail and steamboat, and it was only after I began my Congo research that she let me in on a family secret she had not talked about for decades. She was only twenty-one at the time, but while in Salisbury she had fallen in love and become engaged to a retired officer. The fact that he was divorced with three children was too much for my maternal grandmother, a woman so unutterably proper that she talked of ‘gells’ rather than ‘girls’. My granny flew all the way to Rhodesia to bully her daughter into breaking off the engagement. T howled all the way through the Congo’ is how my mother describes the trip, which she otherwise remembers as being no trickier than any other part of her 1950s African journey.

And that really was the point. Half a century ago there was nothing out-of-the-ordinary about the Congo. It was integrated, not just with the rest of the continent, but with the rest of the world. The Congo’s colonial capital, Leopoldville, named after the acquisitive Belgian monarch, was the hub of one of Africa’s largest airline networks, and the country’s main port, Matadi, was served by a fleet of ocean-going liners. I have a picture of a poster from a Belgian shipping line that overlays an image of a ship on an outline of a very tame-looking Congo. The image was not of a sinister place at all, but of a swathe of African territory accessible by railways represented with cross-hatching, or by shipping routes depicted by elegant red arrows. Trains from the neighbouring Portuguese colony that later became Angola shuttled in and out of the Congo through its copper-rich Katanga province. There were bus links with Rhodesia and across Lake Tanganyika a fleet of ferries moved goods and people to the former colony of German East Africa.

A flavour of that era comes from a guidebook I discovered in a second-hand bookshop in Johannesburg. The 1951 Travel Guide to the Belgian Congo runs to 800 pages of information for visitors. Some of the detail is wonderfully mundane. The names and location of scores of guest houses are listed, along with prices of meals and journey times between local towns. The procedure for buying a hunting licence is spelled out, along with lists of the national parks and their viewing hours. Maps show, in precise detail, the country’s road network, spreading right across the rainforest and climbing over mountain ranges, and the book lists itineraries with helpful hints about turning left at Kilometre 348 or buying pottery from the natives, les indigènes. It has hundreds of black-and-white photographs that show a functioning country - bridges, churches, schools, post offices and towns. And, in blue ink, the inside cover is inscribed ‘Annaliesa’. In my imagination, Annaliesa used it to plan genteel trips to visit waterfalls or go on safari. Today those same journeys would be impossible.

The book conveys the sort of normality my mother recalled. Mum described her steamboat journey through virgin rainforest and how she would lean over the rail to point at sparring hippos, and spot the breaks in the bush where fishing villages of thatched huts stood on the river bank. You could always identify the villages, she said, because of the cluster of needle-thin canoes hanging in the river’s current beneath each settlement. She remembered how the boat dropped her off, apparently in the middle of nowhere, only for her to scramble up the muddy river bank and find, half-hidden by towering elephant grass, a steam-train waiting to take its passengers on the next leg of their journey, with a steward, clad in a peaked cap of rail-company livery, anxious to keep to the timetable.

On the wall of our home in a Northamptonshire village she hung some of the souvenirs she bought from Congolese hawkers. There were brightly coloured crayon pictures of tribal stickmen dancing and hunting against an elegant background of grass huts or canoes. On a rainy day in the British Midlands in the 1970s they took a child’s mind far away to equatorial Africa, to a country my mother still cannot bring herself to call anything but The Belgian Congo’.

She still has packs of unsent postcards produced in Leopoldville. The cards, printed in 1950s Technicolour, show naive Congolese scenes - tribal hunters in headdresses, jungle elephants glaring at the camera and loincloth-clad fishermen. My mother’s view was just as rose-tinted. She knew nothing of the brutality that the Belgians used to maintain their rule, or of the turbulent currents then drawing the Congo towards independence. As a child, I would ask her what had happened to this place where officials stamped her passport with funny French messages in red ink, but she knew little and cared even less.

‘A year or so after we passed through, there was all that beastliness in the Congo,’ was her understated way of putting it. My route would take me through some of the places she visited in 1958, but when I started seriously planning the journey it was clear I would face a great deal of ‘beastliness’.

‘It cannot be done. For many years it has been impossible for an outsider to travel through the east of this country.’ This doom-laden analysis on the Democratic Republic of Congo, the modern name of the territory colonised by the Belgians, came from Justin Marie Bomboko. We met in his once grand but now tatty apartment in the capital, Kinshasa, formerly Leopoldville. A tidemark of white spittle flecked the crease of his mouth, and his eyes were emotionless behind thick-framed glasses, identical to those worn by his former sponsor, Mobutu Sese Seko. From 1965 until 1997 Mobutu had ruled the Congo as an African emperor, plundering the country’s mining revenues and surrounding himself with a wealthy elite, known in Congolese street patois as Les Grosses Légumes, a euphemism for Fat Cats. Mr Bomboko was one of the fattest. Twice he had served as Foreign Minister, during the period when Mobutu had the country’s name changed to Zaire, and for a long time back in the 1960s this now elderly and frail man was kingmaker in the Congo, chairman of an unelected, executive committee of young men, mostly in their thirties, running a country larger than western Europe.

It was January 2001 and I was visiting the Congo for the first time. I had flown to Kinshasa which lies on the southern bank of the Congo River in the west of the country, to cover the aftermath of the assassination of Laurent Kabila, the rebel who ousted Mobutu in 1997. Diplomats, world leaders and African experts had expressed a degree of optimism about Mr Kabila’s arrival, confident that he could do no worse than Mobutu. They were disappointed. Mr Kabila had morphed into the worst type of African dictator - greedy, petty and brutal - and under his reign the Congo’s collapse continued. His murder (shot at point-blank range by a bodyguard, who was mown down seconds later by more loyal bodyguards at the presidential palace in Kinshasa) gave me the first real opportunity to sound out the possibility of crossing the Congo.

Even though Mr Bomboko lived in the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, technically he had opted out of sovereign Congolese territory. He had taken the precaution of moving inside the Belgian diplomatic compound. When I saw the high security fence and well-armed guards that protected both the embassy and his home from the chaos of Kinshasa, I did not need to ask why.

Mr Bomboko was more than seventy years old when I met him. In a sombre voice, he described, in painstaking detail, the series of rebellions and invasions that had gripped his country for forty years. Listing them took over an hour and by the time he finished his declaiming, the flecks of spittle round his mouth had formed into two distinct splodges.

The big mistake that Mobutu made was becoming friends with the Hutus to the east of our country.’ His voice was steady and dispassionate. ‘By allying Congo with the Hutus in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Mobutu laid the foundations for today’s crisis.’

Mobutu’s relationship with the Hutu leaders of Rwanda went beyond mere friendship. He had been so close to Juvenal Habyarimana, the Hutu president of Rwanda whose assassination in 1994 triggered the Rwandan genocide, that the body of his friend had been flown to Kinshasa for burial. And days before Mobutu himself was ousted, he had the remains of Habyarimana exhumed and cremated, so that he could flee the country with the ashes of his old ally.

‘When the genocide ended in Rwanda, the Hutu gunmen responsible for the killings, the interahamwe, were invited by Mobutu to flee into the Congo. They came by the thousand and ten years later they are still there, hiding in the forests near our eastern borders. They are the biggest single source of instability in the country,’ Mr Bomboko explained.

It was the presence of those Hutu gunmen after 1994 that led to Mr Kabila’s early success in ousting Mobutu, ally of the Hutus. The Tutsi regime that had taken over Rwanda, and driven the Hutu killers into the Congo, were happy to exploit Mr Kabila’s ambitions to replace Mobutu. The Tutsi-dominated Rwandan government sent troops, arms and money to support Mr Kabila’s insurgency against Mobutu. And Mr Kabila received similar support from Uganda, anxious to silence its own rebel enemies lurking across the border inside the Congo, staging raids into Ugandan territory. With Rwandan and Ugandan military backing, Kabila swept away Mobutu’s regime in a few heady months in early 1997. Mobutu fled and a few months later, in September 1997, died a painful death from prostate cancer in Morocco, far from the homeland he had misruled for so long.

Kabila’s close relationship with Uganda and Rwanda did not last. Both insisted on keeping troops on the Congolese side of the border, stating that they had not mopped up the rebels they had been so interested in silencing. In reality, the motives of Rwanda and Uganda in maintaining a presence in the Congo were more grubby. They wanted to keep the easy money they were earning from various Congolese mines producing gold, tin and other minerals in the east of the Congo.

Within a year, the relationship between Kabila

Reviews for Blood River

[breic-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A very interesting travel story. Butcher weaves the history of the Congo with his own trip to and along the river. The main weakness is that he does not have enough interactions with people along the way. He explains this himself: > Venturing out of the shade, I faced the same dilemma that I encountered in every place I visited in the Congo. I wanted to nose around, ask questions and take photographs, but I did not want to catch the attention of the local authorities with all the attendant hassle of having to explain who I was, pay bribes and beg not to be arrested as a spy. Also, I was feeling so enervated that I was happy to skulk into the same hut where the crew were restoking and simply avoid the midday heat.Even still, I found the book useful. While I had heard the history before, the travel grounded it for me. And it is quite a surprise to have a trip like this in the 21st century. Some quotes: > Several of the walkers had large African snails stuck to the side of their leaf bundles. The snails did not have to be tied on, as their gooey, muscular foot kept them firmly attached until the moment when they were taken off and cooked. The only other food we saw was cassava paste tied in small rectangular leaf packets.> 'I think the last time I saw a vehicle near here was 1985, but I cannot be sure. All these children you see around you now are staring because I have told them about cars and motorbikes that I saw as a child, but they have never seen one before you arrived.' He carried on talking, but I was still computing what he had just said. The normal laws of development are inverted here in the Congo. The forest, not the town, offers the safest sanctuary and it is grandfathers who have been more exposed to modernity than their grandchildren.> By 1949 the colonial authorities boasted 111,971 kilometres of road across the Congo. By 2004 I doubt if there were more than 1,000 kilometres left in the entire country.> My mother told me of large pods of hippos she saw from her river boat in 1958, sending up jets of water as they shifted their bulk out of the way of the boat. But the Congo's collapse has led to nearly all river life being shot out by starving riverside villagers desperate for protein. Our crocodile sighting was a rare treat.> while Swahili had just one word for forest, the tribal language of Maniema had four special words - Mohuru, Mwitu, Mtambani and Msitu - for jungle of increasing impenetrability.> This region is one of the rare places in the world that fails what I called the Coca-Cola test. The test is simple: can you buy a Coke?> Just as campaigners today use the term Blood Diamonds to discredit gems produced in Africa's war zones, so their predecessors from a hundred years ago spoke of Red Rubber, publishing dramatic accounts of villagers being murdered or having their hands cut off to terrify their neighbours into harvesting more rubber. … Among the earliest campaigners was George Washington Williams, a pioneering African American who travelled by boat as far as the Stanley Falls in 1890 and did something nobody had ever thought to do before; he recorded the testimony of the Congolese themselves. His writings contained eye-witness accounts of the first genocide of the modern era, inspiring him to coin a term that is now used widely, 'crimes against humanity'.> While maintaining the illusion of handing over a single country to the black Congolese, the authorities in Brussels secretly backed the secession of Katanga from the Congo, financing, arming and protecting the pro-Belgian Katangan leader, Moise Tshombe, in return for a promise that the Belgian mining interests in Katanga would be protected. It was one of the most blatant acts of foreign manipulation in Africa's chaotic independence period, and it culminated in one of the cruellest acts of twentieth-century political assassination, when Patrice Lumumba, the first Congolese national figure to win an election, was handed over by Belgian stooges to be murdered by Tshombe's regime. Lumumba's mistake was to hint at pro-Soviet sympathies.

[eyejaybee · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Even before he was posted to Africa by the Daily Telegraph Tim Butcher had dreamt of travelling along the Congo, sub-Saharan Africa's grandest, if darkest, river. His mother had travelled across the greater part of Congo in 1958 when it was still a Belgian dependency, and Butcher's own imagination had been fired by Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" and tales of Stanley's late nineteenth century expedition.Butcher's book paints a fascinating picture of his journey in 2004, setting off from Lake Tanganyika at the eastern extremity of the Congo and then following the course of the river for 1,734 kilometres until it enters the Atlantic at Boma. Congo in the early twenty-first century is a completely broken country. After having been ravaged by a cruel colonial regime under the Belgians until 1960 (indeed, for most of the period from Belgian colonisation until 1960 the country was actually considered as the personal property of the Belgian crown), the battered remains were then ripped apart by brutal tribal differences actively encouraged by the inhuman dictatorships of Mobutu and then Kabila. As if those problems weren't enough, much of the eastern half of this vast country has suffered ceaseless bloody figting between Tutsis and Hutus as the genocide in Rwanda spilled over the border.Butcher demonstrates the irony that in the fifty years following Independence the country has collapsed from a potentially rich source of copper,cobalt, tin, rubber and a range of other mineral (even after the Belgians had relaxed their vice-like grasp) to being one of the poorest countries on the planet. There is no infrastructure left - the roads and railway coneections that the Belgians formed have just been left to be reclaimed by the rain forest. At one point he arrived in a village rifing pillion on a small motorbike to the amazement of the local children - they had heard tales of motor vehicles from their grandparents, but had never witnessed on themselves. For so much of the Congo's population any contact with what might even vaguely represent the modern world is by word of mouth from their elders, and consequently imbued with the characteristics of legend.Butcher travels light, and covers his route in an intriguing section of modes of transport - motorbike, pirogues (dug-out canoes), UN Jeep, barge and helicopter, as well as walking a fair part of the way. En route he encounters great kindness and honesty from those who help him, but he also runs into more than his fair share of ignorance, violence and, it seems, non-stop terror. In one of the saddest episodes a man whom he had only met an hour before pleads with Butcher to take his young son with him - the father knows that his son faces a life of unremitting tragedy and strife in Congo, and he would rather trust him to a stranger than watch his fall prey to illness and the slow death through poverty that would inevitably befall him if he stays.There may be no infrastructure but it seems clear that there is a mindless, burgeoning bureaucracy - whenever Butcher makes it to a new town, he has to see the local self-appointed governor, or one of his apparatchiks, in order to get a new pass entitling him to travel on to the next zone.Butcher has clearly researched the history of the Congo in great detail, and he strives to emulate the historic trek undertaken by Stanley, as commissioned by Leopold of Belgium. However, he never loses sight of the abject cruelty with which Stanley pursued his quest. From Stanley's expedition onwards, the history of the Congo has been written in blood, and Butcher illuminates it with his text. This was a subject about which I knew I was lamentably ignorant, and Butcher has certainly gone some way to redressing that.However, I wouldn't want anyone to imagine that this is a dry history book - throughout his story Butcher keeps the reader engaged in his own adventure, fretting over his setbacks and joining in with his successes.This was one of the finest travel books I have read for a long time.

[karenweyant · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Tim Butcher follows the Congo River through the darkest parts of Africa. A great book that not only explores culture, but history of the world once known as the "Dark Continent".

[richardgarside · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Brings to life all the ills of Africa under Africans

[bibliobibuli_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Tim Butcher, a journalist for The Daily Telegraph decides to recreate H.M. Stanley's famous expedition in the 1870's. (Stanley had been also sponsored by the same newspaper!) He was also curious to see the country that his mother had visited in the 1950's as a tourist. He was told that by just about everyone he contacted that the journey was impossible, but against the odds he manages to enlist the help of aid workers (including a pygmy human rights activist and the Malaysian commander of a vessel working for the UN) and others. Each stage of the journey is uncertain, and he's constantly in danger of his life and in great discomfort. But he does manage in the end to find the transport he needs (motorcycles, dugouts, a UN barge) and the journey continues. It's impossible not to salute his courage.Blood River : A Journey into Africa's Broken Heart is a fascinating account, not just because it takes us into a part of the world we wouldn't normally venture into and lets us share the journey (from our comfy armchairs!), but also for the historical perspectives which are woven into the narrative.In the space of half a century, Congo has gone completely backwards - it is not "a developing country", or an "underdeveloped country", so much as an "un-developing country", going backwards so fast that almost nothing remains of the infrastructure left under Belgian rule due to the greed and incompetence of its leaders. It's a terrifying portrait of how quickly things can unravel. You also come to realise that putting things right isn't a matter of throwing financial aid at the problems, but in establishing the rule of law.It's impossible not to really pity the ordinary people of this failed country, but that there is such potential for economic growth (minerals, fertile land) turns this missed opportunity into a grand tragedy. The book was chosen as one of the reads for the Richard and Judy bookclub and of course made the shortlist for this year's Samuel Johnson Prize.

[rynooo_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Whilst it was great to learn about the Congo's colourful history, the book tends to be over-sentimental and repetitive, particularly towards the end. Additionally, the author's journey was surprisingly uneventful and relatively drama free.

[bibliophial · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

An engrossing, informative, often terrifying travel book about a journalist's retracing of the steps of Stanley along the river Congo, "the broken heart of Africa". Compelling.

[oberon_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

[Blood River by Tim ButcherA significant number of the review on LT are pretty negative about the book. I disagree and found Blood River to be one of the better books I have read this year.The book is an account by the author of an attempt to retrace the route of Henry Morton Stanley following the Congo river. Having recently read Explorers of the Nile by Tim Jeal, Stanley's story was pretty fresh in my recollection but for purposes of the review a thumbnail sketch of Stanley seems to be in order. Stanley started as a journalist and is most remembered for successfully leading an expedition to locate David Livingstone, an early explorer of the African great lakes and Nile river, near Lake Tanganyika. For most people, the line of "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" is the some total of Stanley's place in the history books. However, after his meeting with Livingstone, Stanley engaged in his own explorations of Africa that were every bit as impressive as Livingstone's and the other Victorian explorers searching for the Nile. Stanley initially set out to follow a river identified as the Lualaba. Tracing the river was one of Livingstone's goals that he failed to accomplish. The belief at the time was that the Lualaba was a major tributary of the Nile as it was a northern flowing river of considerable volume when first discovered hence it was supposed to be the true start of the Nile. Stanley's expedition proved otherwise as the Lualaba turns west and is in actuality, a major source of the Congo. Butcher sets out to retrace Stanley's initial trip along the Congo. What makes the book so interesting is the state of modern Congo (called today the Democratic Republic of Congo). Congo is a failed state. Butcher traces the history of Congo and how it got to the state it was in when Butcher set out on his expedition. It is an ugly story of decay, corruption and civil war. Congo was consumed by the same conflict that resulted in the Rwandan genocide. That conflict spilled across Congo's borders and collapsed an already rickety state. The ensuing conflicts (sometimes known as the First and Second Congo War) has resulted in a massive death tolls. One of the great ironies of the conflicts is that no one can agree on how many people have died with estimates ranging from 5.4 million people to about a million. If the conflict is so opaque that you can have a causality rate that varies by 4 million people it is fair to say that there are a lot of unknowns.Butcher's travel took place shortly after the conclusion the Second Congo War in a period of prolonged instability and low level conflict where there were serious questions about the stability of the accords that ended the Second Congo War.What Butcher finds on his trip is that the infrastructure of Congo is all but gone. Where once there were highways, railways, bridges and steamships, almost nothing is left. Some has been destroyed by conflict but much has simply been wiped away by the relentless jungle. As a result, Congo has been reduced to a collection towns and cities that are cut off from each other and the broader world. The little bit of civilization present is in the form of the UN or a few aid groups that are supplied largely by air as all other infrastructure is gone. Butcher contrasts this present reality with the state of Congo in the late 50s when it was still a Belgium colony. At that time, there were roads, cars, police and so on and travelers could crisscross the country if they so chose. The other element of the book that stood out was the level of personal risk that Butcher undertook in making the trip. Here, I had trouble relating to Butcher. The level of risk he took by going into essentially lawless areas was extraordinary. I would characterize it as fool hardy. The fact that he largely succeeded on his trek along the river seems more the result of fortune than anything else and he clearly put himself at significant risk for the project. There is not much to be cheerful about in a book about Congo but it is a gripping story and a warning that the veneer of civilization can peel away very rapidly. Highly recommended.

[kaitanya64 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Butcher sets out to retrace Stanley's descent of the Congo River. While I had a few quibble early in the book about some of Butcher's claims that King Leopold's acquisition of Congo territory started the "scramble for Africa," the rest of the book is spectacular. Butcher's narrative is compelling, but also his history and social context are sensitive and clear. He alludes often to Stanley, but doesn't make the mistake of many "retracers" of getting too caught up in the "quest" to forget the real people and places around him. Fantastic.

[travelledguy · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Very interesting book about how a country in Africa can advance back in time. In some places in the Congo grandparents knew what a car looked like but the children did not. Makes you wonder if the world has the ability to advance backward too.

[millata_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

An account of Butcher's long term dream to recreate H.M. Stanley's 1870's adventure through the Congo. The book describes his journey and the country in comparison to the original. The story is captivating and, at the same time, horrifying, as Butcher accounts the bloody history of the country based on interviews and old documentation. Some of the individual tales are simply heartbreaking. In the end, Butcher summarises his impression of the collective memory of the people in one simple sentence: "And we fled into the bush." After I finished the book, I thought that this is the type of a historical account that I would like to see read in schools. Something to make one think instead of memorising.

[mumineurope · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

True story, a trip down the Congo following in Stanley's footsteps

[danawl_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

An amazing account of travel through the Congo and the difficulties its people face in living in the jungle.

[samsheep_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A superb book - the tale of an amazing adventure combined with a highly readable distillation of Congo history. I cannot comprehend why someone would want to undertake such a journey but I'm very glad he did, and lived to tell the tale.

[dickcraig · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Tim Butcher follows the Congo River through the Democratic Republic of Congo detailing the steady decline of the country to the point it resembles more the times when it was first explored. Without the assistance of the various aid agencies he would not have been able to complete his trip. The country is so rich in natural resources and is so wracked by wars and corruption that one wonders if it will be ever a functioning state. After spending time in Uganda I have come to love the continent and would love to travel to the Congo, but after reading the author's experience I think I will just read about it.

[gooneruk · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I finished Blood River by Tim Butcher the other day, in a continuation of my recent trend towards reading about sub-Saharan Africa. It’s an account of Butcher’s attempt to recreate the first mapping of the River Congo by Stanley (of “Dr Livingstone, I presume” fame) in the 19th century, along with a potted history of the eponymous country.I think the beauty of this book is not just the actual journey itself, but the way in which Butcher’s enthusiasm for the whole project sadly fades throughout, in the face of a country which has seemingly gone backwards whilst the rest of the world has advanced.Countless people tell him that whenever any threat to them occurs, from whatever source (government, militias, rebels, foreigners), they run into the bush to hide. Whenever they come back out, inevitably their homes and businesses have been ransacked and/or burnt, and so begins again the cycle of semi-permanent rebuilding and sustenance living.In a similar manner to when I read The State of Africa, which also covered the Congo, I couldn’t help but feel depressed by the end of reading this book. The continent of Africa as a whole (with exceptions, of course) just seems to be getting left further and further behind, and there is very little impetus from within or without towards improving the situation.

[mwhel_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This very engrossing travelogue of the author's journey down the Congo River is told against a backdrop of the recorded history of many other explorers, adventurers, missionaries, mercenaries, native peoples, profiteers, international aid workers, government officials, revolutionaries, movie stars(!) and others who have left their impact on the country throughout the last two centuries. The historical references alone would have made this an interesting read.In 2004, the Democratic Republic of Congo had declined to a state that was in many ways worse than the pre-colonial era when Henry Morton Stanley first made the voyage that this author attempted to duplicate here. Conditions were deplorable everywhere and the voyage was full of potential hazard. His motto, "cities bad, open good" serves him well. It is heart-sickening to read of the corruption, greed and ruthlessness that is routine is a country of such vast natural resources.Like Jeffrey Tayler in "Facing the Congo" and Peter Stark in "At the Mercy of the River", the author is eventually brought down by sickness. I am left with the impression that without his connections with UN personnel stationed in remote areas and cash reserves, the author would not likely have gotten far along this jouney.

[ashmolean1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I don't read a lot of non fiction but this is one of those that reads like fiction. Butcher's journey to follow the path of Stanley up the Congo was fascinating. He gives you background history about the Congo as well as details of his own perilous journey in an easy to read narrative style. Well worth reading.

[nero56 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A travelogue based on retracing Stanley's trip down the Congo River which subsequently opened up the Congo to colonization by the King of Belgium. Instead of the entourage that accompanied Stanley, the author was generally accompanied by only a few people; however, he had the benefit of motorbikes and UN boat as transportation at various times. While it wasn't a realistic following in the footsteps of Stanley, not least because he skipped part of the journey, it may have been the best that could have been accomplished during the time he was there. The book did a creditable job rehashing the history of the Congo and its current political crises.

[tony2704 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Good read and a reminder that there are still countries where corruption is rife. Would have preferred more about the trip and less about Stanley

[st5croixsue · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is an amazing travelogue, with history interspersed, of a journalist following the path of the infamous Stanley into the heart of the Congo. It is a real eye opener on the extreme consequences of decades of lawlessness.

[staffreads · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is an amazing travelogue, with history interspersed, of a journalist following the path of the infamous Stanley into the heart of the Congo. It is a real eye opener on the extreme consequences of decades of lawlessness.SRH

[tcarter_77 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Having visited Lubambashi and Kalemie a few years after the author, in a period of relative peace, I recognised the places and people he was writing about. I was heart broken for the people I met, that they had had to live through this, and astounded at the amount of progress that had been made in those few years. A really well written, up close and personal insight into one of the most depressing conflicts of global history.

[ruby_barnes_3 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

How to get very quickly up an unpleasant river surrounded by awful foreigners.An unremarkable account of a geographically remarkable journey. Amazon web reviews are good but, having read other books on Africa, this one is very poor. Bloody River would be a better title as the author seems personally offended by the Congo river while he races along it as fast as possible. If there had been a motorway he would have done the whole trip as a motorbike pillion passenger, shouting anecdotes from books he has read into the slipstream. Nothing interesting happens to him personally. Butcher has very little originality in his African commentary except in the running account of his own insipid mental and physical state. First-comers to books on Africa might be impressed. If you want to know about Africa there are many better books than this one. State of Africa by Martin Meredith is heavyweight but far superior. Michael Palin's Sahara is funnier. Even Geldof in Africa is better than Bloody River.